USE OF CHEMICAL SENSOR ARRAYS FOR FOOD AND FRAGRANCE ANALYSIS

. Many workers have recently developed and demonstrated the use of gas sensor arrays to detect and recognize a variety of compounds. In general, a pattern recognition approach is used in which the signature of an unknown sample is compared to a library of signatures of known substances. All of these efforts have shown varying degrees of success when applied to pure compounds. Unfortunately, flavors and fragrances are never pure compounds. A prototype gas sensor array has been constructed and tested with various mixtures of interest. The results are discussed in terms of their implication to the food and fragrance industry. Early experiments on gasoline-alcohol mixtures demonstrated that the signatures do not follow a rule of mixing, but were more strongly influenced by the more volatile and/or more reactive component. This led us to examine the behavior of alcohol-water mixtures for possible quality control in the distilling industry. We discovered that the signature of alcohol dominated even at concentrations as low as ten percent. Preliminary experiments were also performed to see if the prototype sensor array could be used to automatically detect rancidity in dairy products. Flavorings and essential oils are in many cases even more complex mixtures. The behavior of representative classes of these substances were characterized in an attempt to understand their signatures on the basis of their constituents.